The Great Famine in the Soviet Union lasted between the years of 1930 and 1933. The devastation peaked in winter of 1932 and continued throughout 1933. Statistics which accurately represent the
tragedy are impossible to find due to Stalin's deliberate erasure of records. These records would have depicted a scene of mass murder. It has been estimated that the Famine took around eight to ten million lives. Five to six million of these citizens belonged to the Ukrainian SSR. This occurred because of Stalin's direct targeting of the Ukrainian state in order to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union in an unrealistic time frame. Thus, for maximum results, he instituted a system of
collective farming throughout the USSR which most severely affected the peasants of the Ukrainian country side. When the peasants rebelled, refusing to be manipulated by the Soviet Regime, Stalin
punished the peasantry for their defiance by instituting a man-made famine through the exportation of harvested crops out of Ukraine. Furthermore, he prohibited the provision of aid, as well as the
emigration of Ukrainian peasants from the countryside. This resulted in the mass starvation of the
Ukrainian peasantry, killing millions of innocent victims. More recently, the topic of Holodomor, the Famine in Ukraine, has resurfaced as a politically polarizing issue. Russia refuses to accept its role in the mass murder of Ukrainian people, while Ukraine asserts the Russian role as an intentional exploiter of Ukraine. Their refusal to acknowledge Holodomor represents an example of Russian authority's inability to recognize Ukraine as an equal sovereign nation.